The thing about being sixteen is that everything already feels wrong with your body before anything supernatural has a chance to make it worse.
Mara Vasquez had known this truth since seventh grade, when her hips had arrived like uninvited guests and her chest had followed shortly after, and the mirror had started showing her someone she only vaguely recognized. She'd made peace with it — mostly. Or at least she'd learned to stop arguing with it every morning, which she figured was the same thing.
It was an October Thursday, the kind of Thursday that smelled like wet leaves and cafeteria chili, and Mara was sitting in AP English trying not to fall asleep over her copy of Frankenstein when her best friend Jess slid a folded note across the aisle.
The note said: do you think Mr. Hartwell is secretly hot or openly hot?
Mara wrote back: neither. He looks like a thumb with glasses.
Jess stifled a laugh so violent she nearly knocked over her water bottle, and Mr. Hartwell looked up from the board with the long-suffering expression of a man who had been teaching juniors for seventeen years and had achieved something approaching enlightenment through sheer exhaustion.
"Ms. Vasquez. Ms. Okafor. Would either of you like to share your thoughts on Shelley's use of the creature's journal entries as a narrative device?"
"They make him feel real," Mara said without missing a beat. "Like, giving him a voice means he's not just a monster someone else talks about. He gets to tell his own story."
Mr. Hartwell considered this with the gravity of a man receiving divine transmission. "Yes. Exactly. Thank you, Ms. Vasquez." He turned back to the board. Jess kicked Mara's shin under the desk.
Mara kicked back.
This was normal. This was fine. This was Thursday.
She didn't know, sitting in that plastic chair with the sticky armrest and the carved initials of ten years of students before her, that it was the last ordinary Thursday she would ever have.
* * *
Mara lived in Sutter Falls, Oregon, which was the kind of town that appeared in travel blogs with titles like "Hidden Gems of the Pacific Northwest" and was immediately ruined by the subsequent tourism. It sat at the base of a ridge of old-growth fir and cedar, the kind of forest that was dark even in summer, where the canopy was thick enough that the undergrowth had given up on sunlight and made a life for itself in permanent twilight. The locals called the ridge the Backs. Nobody hiked there. There were signs, and the signs had been there longer than the current generation of residents, and everyone sort of understood that the signs were serious even if they no longer remembered why.
Mara had grown up ignoring the Backs the way you ignore a mole you've had since birth. It was just there, a dark line against the sky every morning when she looked out her bedroom window.
She rode home from school on her bike, taking the long way around the park because Jess lived on that side of town and they had the kind of friendship that extended naturally into after-school hours without requiring specific invitations. Jess was waiting on her porch steps, already changed out of her school clothes, a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos open on her knee.
"I've been thinking," Jess said, by way of greeting.
"That's new."
"Shut up. I've been thinking about your essay for Hartwell." Jess had a way of eating Cheetos like she was personally offended by each one. "The creature one. You should argue that he's more human than Victor. Like, morally."
Mara leaned her bike against the porch railing and dropped down beside her. "I mean, he literally kills people."
"Victor creates life and then abandons it because it's ugly." Jess offered the bag. "Which of those is more monstrous?"
Mara took a handful and thought about it. The afternoon light was doing something golden and theatrical through the maple on Jess's front lawn, and somewhere down the block someone was mowing grass, and a dog was barking at the mower, and the whole scene was so perfectly, tediously normal that Mara felt a wave of something she didn't have a word for — not quite love, not quite sadness, something in between that tasted like nostalgia for a present moment she was still inside.
She would think about that feeling later. She would think about it a lot.
"Okay," she said. "Yeah. I think you're right."
Jess looked smug in the way that only people who are right but rarely given credit for it can look smug.
* * *
Mara's house was a ten-minute bike ride from Jess's, up the hill on Carlisle Avenue, a blue craftsman with white trim that her mother was always intending to repaint and never quite got around to. Her mother, Diane, was a dental hygienist and had the hands to prove it — strong, precise, always slightly chapped no matter what lotion she used. Her father, Roberto, had been a geologist until he wasn't, which was a thing Mara thought about sometimes in the way you think about a tooth that used to hurt — not with active pain, just with a kind of phantom awareness. He'd left when she was eleven, not in a dramatic way, not in a screaming way, just in the way of a tide going out, gradual and inevitable and then suddenly complete.
There was her grandmother, too. Abuela Celia, who lived in the converted garage apartment that smelled of candles and dried herbs and the specific wool of a decades-old cardigan. Abuela Celia was seventy-two and sharp as a tack and regarded the modern world with the polite skepticism of a woman who had survived several of its previous versions and wasn't impressed.
"Mija," Abuela Celia said when Mara came in through the back door that evening, which connected the main house to the apartment. She was sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea and a rosary and her reading glasses, though there was no book in front of her. She was just sitting.
"Hi, Abuela." Mara opened the small fridge for a juice box, because Abuela always had juice boxes and her mother always had LaCroix and there was a clear winner in that contest.
"Come sit with me a minute."
Mara sat. Abuela Celia looked at her for a long moment in a way that Mara associated with things like you've grown and also with things like I need to tell you something difficult, and she wasn't sure which category this was.
"How are you feeling?" Abuela said.
"Fine. Normal. Why?"
"You've been in a mood."
"I'm always in a mood. I'm sixteen."
Abuela smiled, brief and private. "I was in a mood at sixteen too." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "You know, your grandfather was the same. Very internal. Everything going on in here —" she tapped the side of her head, "— and none of it coming out until it was too big to hold anymore."
"I'm fine, Abuela."
"I know you are." She paused. "I dreamed about a wolf last night."
Mara looked up.
"An old dream," Abuela said, waving a hand as though it were nothing, as though she were talking about misplacing her keys. "Pay an old woman no mind." She smiled again and picked up her rosary. "Go do your homework."
Mara went. But she looked back once from the doorway, and Abuela Celia was not doing her rosary. She was sitting very still, looking at the table, and her lips were moving but not in prayer.